Abandoned Mine (or “The Mine”)
My Review: This movie is in IMDB as The Mine, though even there, the poster art clearly says “Abandoned Mine”. Whatever. This is a weird movie. It looks and sounds like an ABC Family after-school special, all bubbly and light and colorful. And it is almost that. It’s kind of a Goosebumps movie, like horror for kids. It’s a little too intense for young kids, but I’d definitely say it’s horror for pre-teens. It’s so lightweight and harmless, it’s really weird actually. I mean, that’s a reasonable niche for a movie to fill, but I just didn’t expect it and I’ve never seen it before.
Anyway, it’s almost a found-footage movie (mixes shakycam and regular camera), about a group of kids who go into an abandoned mine together, all wearing video-camera helmets. They’re led by one kid who gave them all the helmets and wants to arrange this get-together as kind of one last hurrah before they all are going to different places, for college or not-college as the case may be.
SPOILER PARAGRAPH if you care! For most of the movie, the “ghosts” are actually that kid messing with the others, in a ridiculously elaborate and really uncool way that would make me glad I was moving away, personally. At the end there are real ghosts, in a vague minimal way.
My Rating: 2/5 Cardboard Masks.
My Movie Idea: You know how in every found-footage movie, there’s one character who is really obnoxious and continues filming all the time when everyone else is yelling to just put the camera away? My movie is a found-footage movie, and that guy is in it, as the one with the camera of course (in this movie, he’s the only one filming). He’s as annoying as always, and just won’t seem to put the camera away no matter how crazy things get. Isn’t that always so weird, like why are you still holding a camera (and pointing it the right way) as your friend is bleeding out on the floor, right?
Weeeellll... in this movie, you find out why: the guy with the camera is the killer. He’s arranged all these elaborate traps and he’s getting sadistic pleasure from leading all his ‘friends’ to their deaths (maybe he’s a social outcast who’s paying them all back for some slight he percieves in the past). This is not made clear for most of the movie, but it becomes more obvious as things go on, until eventually the second-to-last victim he actually kills directly, stabbing them on camera. Unfortunately for him, the last victim walks in on this, realizes what’s up, and overpowers him and beats him unconscious with his own camera. The very end of the movie could be shown from police cameras, or maybe footage from the interrogation of the killer, something like that. A nice little dark coda.
